Offshore Renewables, and in particular Offshore Wind, is a rapidly growing sector. The costs of offshore wind have fallen dramatically in recent years, leading to wind now being one of the cheapest forms of electricity.
Onshore renewables and battery storage are areas of significant growth in the drive to meet Net Zero targets. Co-location of low carbon technologies, such as PV generation and battery storage, is also becoming more common both to increase potential revenues and to balance output to mitigate grid connection issues.
The electricity networks owners and operators are responsible for ensuring that the electricity networks used to connect consumers with generation sources are sufficiently reliable, resilient and increasingly that sustainability targets can be met at an affordable cost to the consumer.
Many Local Authorities and Councils have ambitions to reduce carbon emissions to meet Net Zero targets. Actions may include increasing the use of renewable energy, enabling the uptake of low carbon technologies such as EVs within town and city planning, developing decarbonised industrial clusters and master-planning new or retrofit areas to drive low carbon emissions for the future.
The purpose of energy regulators is to protect energy customers to ensure they are treated fairly, and increasingly to ensure that low carbon energy provision is adopted. As such, regulators develop policy to promote and encourage these areas, as well as setting the price controls for companies that operate the gas and electricity networks.
